Gaming schools? When I stopped studying, the idea of schools teaching how to make games just didn’t exist. To me at least. WTF?!, is pretty much what I thought, when they started popping all over in the past few years. Now, they even have TV ads going all out, like it’s every parent’s dream that their kid ends up making video games: “You too can be a hero game designer, enroll now!”.
Weren’t the people that make games just born with the fire and skills? Someone tell me: what gaming schools did Miyamoto and Kojima attend? And who taught the Final Fantasy makers? The StarCraft guys?
Then I saw a couple interesting videos from students projects here and there on the web. And we started working, at what wasn’t called Gamocracy yet, with dotsMarc, who’s coming out of one French school, ENJMIN, himself. I met other students at the GDC. I even got a friend who got paid to do a talk about game design at the same school dotsMarc’s from. That was the last straw: if they put their hands in their pockets for a friend, these schools couldn’t be bad, could they?
I decided I wanted to check some out and found out a pretty big one is just a fifteen minutes walk away from home: I paid a visit to ISART Digital last week.
In the article below, I’ll introduce you to the school through various angles. I’ll try to be somewhat thorough. Serious and all.